The ten most Instagrammed hotels of 2016

In December 2016, Instagram announced that it had built a community of 600 million users, with 100 million people signing up to the photo-sharing app since last summer. Ever-popular with travellers, its geo-tagging feature has revealed the ten most-Instagrammed hotels of 2016.

The trend here clearly shows that Las Vegas is one of the most Instagrammable places on Earth; partly because it is a place where people are frequently drunk and love to show off (both IRL and online), and because it is so surreal it just begs to be photographed.

In this list of the top-ten Instagrammed hotels, five of them were in Sin City. However, when it comes to the world-wide list of most Instagrammed cities, Las Vegas ranked 18th, behind New York in first place, Paris in second, London in third, Moscow in fourth and LA in fifth position.

These days, Instagram is a compelling source of inspiration for people looking to book holidays, so the more a hotel, airline or destination is photographed and hashtagged, the more likely other people will visit too. It’s a modern form of “word of mouth” and far more effective, in many ways, than old-fashioned advertising.

According to a recent survey by Topdeck Travel of 31,000 people from 134 countries, 76 per cent said that a friend’s recommendations were the main thing that influenced where they would travel to next.

Among Millennials, a survey of US travellers from marketing companies AMP and Blitz showed that 84 per cent are likely or very likely to plan a trip based on someone else’s holiday photos or social media updates, trumping traditional sources of inspiration such as magazines, TV and movies. And it’s not just young people – 73 per cent of 30- to 55-year-old travellers are motivated by social media too.

The report finds that Uber and Airbnb are the most-mentioned brands that travellers follow. “While Uber is promotion and stunt-driven, Airbnb uses social tools to highlight destinations that are purposely unlike any hotel.

“Each has its own clearly defined voice and deliberately ignores its category’s previously defined ‘swim lane’. Both offer lessons about the possibilities to inspire consumers by earning engagement with a larger audience in ways that traditional travel brands have not.”